(2016-04-27) Thompson Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work

Derek Thompson: Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work. Women earn a fraction of men’s average hourly wages in the United States, somewhere between 79 percent and 92 percent, depending on how one adjusts the data.

The wage gap at the top is the sum of many cultural forces, including discrimination at work and an expectation that new moms stay home while high-earning dads get back to work. But it is also the result of a subtler cultural force—a values gap. Among equally smart men and women, men, on average, gravitate toward making as much money as possible and working long hours (work-week) to do it. Women, on average, do not.

Even before men and women enter the workforce, researchers see this values gap and its role in the pay gap.

Students’ values shape their majors and their jobs.

And yet there is evidence that women in the U.S. and in other rich countries are happier at the office, because they have sought out work that is more flexible. Female employees report being happier than men at work, according to a 2014 study by the Council on Contemporary Families.

Rich American men, by comparison, are the workaholics of the world. They put in significantly longer hours than both fully employed middle-class Americans and rich men in other countries. Between 1985 and 2010, the weekly leisure time of college-educated men fell by 2.5 hours, more than any other demographic.

It’s hard to identify the root causes of the values gap...